Organic Milk Debate

Dairies dispute `organic' values

Ex-hippie farmers contest practices of big producers

January 10, 2005|By Andrew Martin, Tribune national correspondent.

PLATTEVILLE, Colo. — Mark Retzloff is considered a visionary in the booming organic industry.

But his latest venture, an expansive dairy at the base of the Rocky Mountains, is causing a rift in the small circle of entrepreneurs -- one-time hippies and anti-war protesters-turned-business magnates -- who created the organic milk business from scratch a little more than a decade ago.

Retzloff is president and chief organic officer of Aurora Organic Dairy, a year-and-a-half-old company that operates with 5,300 cows on a sloping plain about 40 miles north of Denver and has a new milk bottling plant right beside it.

What makes Retzloff's organic dairy, and a half dozen others like it, so controversial is a provision buried in the federal code that requires that organic livestock have "access to pasture." Some argue that the pasture rule dictates that the cows spend their days munching grass in open fields, rather than being fed organic grain in pens as they are at Aurora Organic.

The issue underscores a much broader debate about the mission of the organic industry as it expands beyond its modest, granola roots into a multibillion-dollar business that has attracted investors with less altruistic goals.

Some leaders in the organic milk business contend a core value of the industry is to support family farmers. Organic dairy farming often is touted as a way for dairy farmers to survive--and even thrive--at a time when small family farms are being forced out of business by megadairies with thousands of cows.

"We need to be an alternative to the 100-year trend of eliminating farmers," said Gary Hirshberg, chief executive officer of Stonyfield Farm yogurt, noting that organic farmers are paid substantially more for their milk than conventional dairy farmers. "By keeping people in agriculture, you are much more certain of the [product] quality and the care of the animals."

Retzloff and some others counter that, while supporting family farms is important, so too is converting as much land as possible to organic--to preserve the environment--and making organic milk more affordable for American consumers. A gallon of organic milk typically costs about $5; a gallon of regular milk about $3.50.

Steve Demos, who oversees Horizon Organic and Silk soy milk for Dean Foods, said that unless the organic industry tries to accommodate consumer demand, "you'll have an elitist industry selling niche products at three times what the average person can afford."

Demos, who founded White Wave, the company that first produced Silk soy milk, said his strategy is to support family farms while promoting higher standards for larger, corporate-style operations like those run by Horizon and Aurora Organic.

Meeting `organic' criteria

By law, only products that meet specific federal criteria can be labeled "organic," and the National Organic Standards Board, appointed by the federal secretary of agriculture, determines those standards. Organic dairy cows, for instance, must eat grain that isn't genetically modified or treated with pesticides or fertilizers, and the herds cannot be given growth hormones or antibiotics.

Furthermore, "the producer must provide access to the outdoors, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air, and direct sunlight suitable to the species, its stage of production, the climate and the environment," according to the rules. "This requirement includes access to pasture for ruminant animals."

The dispute over what constitutes an organic cow is rooted in a decision Retzloff made a decade ago, when as an executive and co-founder of Horizon Organic he converted a conventional megadairy in Idaho into the first large-scale organic dairy. And it has pitted some of the earliest pioneers in the organic industry against one another.

Pushing for strict enforcement of the pasture rule are Hirshberg, a staunch environmentalist who was making windmills and solar-powered aquariums before he joined Stonyfield Farm in 1983, and George Siemon, chief executive officer of Organic Valley, an organic dairy cooperative.

Siemon started an organic farm in 1977 as part of the back-to-the-land movement that eschewed consumerism and was the first to sell organic milk on a commercial basis starting in 1988.

Their primary opponents are Retzloff, who opened an organic cooperative in 1968 while a student and anti-war protester at the University of Michigan, and Demos, who after traveling in India and meditating, began making tofu in a bucket in 1977 and delivering it to local stores.

The pasture debate has intensified in recent years as the organic industry has taken off, attracting the interest of major corporations and venture capitalists.